Posts tagged with: John Mark Reynolds

The latest topic of The City podcast is the higher education bubble, featuring Cate MacDonald, Dr. John Mark Reynolds, and Dr. Holly Ordway. Reynolds makes the point that bubbles can arise when things are overvalued, but that it is important to determine whether that thing is relatively overvalued or absolutely overvalued. That is, to speak of a higher education bubble is to recognize that higher education is relatively more expensive than it is worth, but that it isn’t therefore worth nothing. The challenges facing higher education are various and multi-faceted, and one of the key issues is the necessity of determining how college education ought to be valued.

It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.

The adjunct phenomenon also features prominently in the JMM controversy between Pannapacker and Baer. As Baer contends, “Adjunct is a different problem in which academic leaders are more victims than perpetrators. The real perpetrator, at least for public universities, is the state legislator who has so unthinkingly starved higher education of resources.”

Moving from the state to the federal level, one possible consequence of the Affordable Care Act is that graduates who rely on adjunct teaching to make a living may face a greater squeeze on their already questionable financial livelihoods. As Mark Peters and Douglas Belkin report in The Wall Street Journal, “The federal health-care overhaul is prompting some colleges and universities to cut the hours of adjunct professors” because of the potential costs of providing health coverage to those adjuncts who teach 30 hours per week or more.

In addition to the GodBlogCon coverage here by Jordan, I’d like to point readers to two speakers who gave thought provoking talks on the careful use of language. That is, the careful use of language in a time where language is often treated as an ephemeral or disposable thing in the service of the latest Web-enabled communications widget. Not really.

On Saturday, Ken Myers offered “Renewed Minds Online: The Internet, Media Ecology, and the Christian Consciousness.” Myers is host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, a high quality source of audio programming on a wide variety of issues. Here is the gist of Myer’s talk (podcast available here):

The word, spoken and written, lives at the center of Christian faith. The case has been made by many theologians and philosophers that human nature is in its essence linguistic; we are, after all created in the image of a speaking and writing God, one who utters all things into existence, who reveals his law by writing with his finger on tablets of stone, who reveals himself in dreams and visions, but who also provides words to accompany and sometimes explain those images; who comes among us as the living Word. Bread alone is not the source of our life, but rather words.

How we use language should thus be a matter of thoughtfulness and deliberateness. Not only should we pay attention to the way we use words; we also need to attend to how the setting within which our words are presented to the world spins their reception, often in ways we never intended.

The closing talk by John Mark Reynolds, “On The Art of Online Conversation,” looked at how online discourse too often degenerates, particularly in political circles, to a harsh and unhealthy contest of who can shout the loudest. Reynolds, a philospher and director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, also looks at the way online writing has landed in the strange middle ground between books and conversation. Reynolds observes that the “immediacy” of online conversation is its great advantage, and also its great drawback. Those online conversations, authored with great care or with almost no thought at all, tend to stay around a long time after the live interaction is over.

Reynolds also offers rules for good conversations starting with, “A good discussion begins, most critically, with the right question.”

Day 2 marked the end of GodblogCon 2007. A highlight of the day was LaShawn Barber’s talk which provided both concrete advice for clear and concise writing, as well as testimony to how blogging can become a profession. The latter depends on the former, of course. She closed with the mandate: “Be bold, confident, and passionate.”

We concluded the day with a large roundtable discussion including the forty or so Godbloggers who persevered to the end. John Mark Reynolds facilitated a lively discussion about the promises, perils, and the future of blogging and new media. We closed the roundtable by going around and having each person make a bold statement or prediction. Mine was “Bloggers will soon be the new webmasters: everyone is going to need one on staff or have ready access to one’s expertise.”

Much like the practice of blogging itself, GodblogCon is a meeting, or fellowship, rather, that is still in its infancy. The conference went very smoothly and was excellently coordinated. But much like the new media itself, GodblogCon has a great deal of promise and potential. I hope that I personally and Acton as an institution can become more involved as the “Godblogosphere” continues to mature.